I am a performer, writer, teacher, artist and producer of theater projects that explore the big questions of life through creation myths and folk tales.
Here are some fragments and glimpses of the story of my life....
I came into this world in 1965 with a poet's temperament and an artist's heart. I wonder if at times I seemed odd to the family of engineers and rationalists who raised me in the suburbs of the USA. At 12, I learned about landfills. I learned that the trash we carefully put in cans and bins was carted away to create a mountain of trash. This seemed crazy to me, and this is the lesson I drew from it: The grown ups are not alright.
At 13, I was mentored by an art teacher who had been through a spiritual awakening she referred to as "Kundalini" (out of body experiences, otherworldly encounters and more). Later in life I would experience a few mystical events that came through me. As an adult, I conceive of the world around me as an "inhabitted world", enlivened and animated by spirits, beings and mysteries.
In my late teens I had two experiences of a book reaching out to choose me, rather than the other way around. The first book was RD Laing's "Politics of Experience", which taught me that normalcy and craziness can be seen as social constructs. The second book that chose me was Joseph Campbell's "Occidental Mythology" which taught me that our Patriarchal mythos (male god on high) replaced other more ancient forms of mythos with a more complex interplay of the divine masculine and divine feminine. Through a series of coincidences I got to meet Campbell. I told him of my interest in myth and ritual he told me to look into the indigenous traditions here in North America. This advice turned out to be a bit prophetic. A few years later I would meet the woman I would fall in love with and marry. She is Latina, with Native American heritage from south of the border.
20+ years ago my wife described herself as a "five-foot-tall-47-year-old-Michigan-born-Chicana-Latina-migrant-worker-got-her-PH.D.-comparative-religionist-Mesoamericanist-teacher-performer-storyteller-writer-gave-forth-her-first-born-child-Benito-Feliz-at-41-it-can-be-done-by-the-blessings-of-the-ancestors-deep-in-love-with-husband-Daniel-in-the-thick-of-dreamworking-community-in-theater-worldly-WOMAN."
Over the past 30+ years, we have produced theater projects where kids take the stage and bring creation myths and folk stories to life. We would often begin our workshops with our son (a gifted dancer) improvising moves that evoke elements in nature (such as the slow, fluid motion of ocean waves) while the kids would mirror his movements, creating together the feeling of the sea in motion. As our son and the kids were immersed in this movement, my wife and I would speak to the kids, saying "You are creating a world upon the stage. You are creating a world...". This is the message I intend to convey to you with this website, earthimagining.com. You are creating a world. We are creating a world. What kind of world do we want to create, for ourselves and for generations to come?